Rubicon Tech had offices in a building just outside downtown Arcade, its windows reflective gold glass. I could still see the glue marks from a previous tenant’s logo beneath the sign in reception. RUBICON was rendered in leaning black text, underscored with red, blue, and green lines, to emphasize momentum, efficiency, and dynamism. The receptionist was listening to Jewel on a little CD player. After I signed in but before I could sit down, she’d summoned Baker Watt.

He insisted I call him Baker or Bake. A few inches shorter than me, his sideburns shaved up too high, he wore a dress shirt with vertical white-and-salmon stripes and a pair of loose-fit khakis. On the filing cabinets that flanked his desk, he displayed Ole Miss Rebels footballs.

Watt told me he’d been in Arcade five years—“Married a mountain woman,” he half lamented—and with Rubicon Tech for two. They were a relatively new corporation, or rather a new offshoot of an old corporation.

“I think I owe you an apology,” he said, once I had my notebook out. “I was pretty rude on the phone yesterday. Thing is, we get competitors calling all the time, trying everything they can to get something out of us. I thought you were another lame attempt. But I looked you up, read some of your work, and I think it’s good stuff. I can always tell where the brains are.”

“So you won’t mind my asking a few questions.”

“We’ve never had a journalist come around,” he said. “To be perfectly honest, we’re not really equipped to handle the exposure. We don’t even have a director of communications. We’ve just been going about our business.”

“And what is your business?”

“We save lives.” He smiled. “And we’re going to save a whole lot more.”

“Like Floella’s.”

He glanced at a paper on his desk. “That’s the subject at Ascension. Tell me something. Are you really related to her, Whitney?”

I leaned back from my notebook and said, “Not exactly.”

“That’s what I thought.”

“I dated her stepson.”

“I see.”

“Someone told me she was picked up by a purple truck. Do you know what that’s about?”

Watt brightened and said, “Common Dreams. That’s the charity we sponsor. Now, if you wanted to write about Common Dreams, that would be terrific. They don’t get enough recognition.”

He slid a page across his desk. It was a map of Arcade, the districts shaded different colors. The Tomahawk was pale red.